I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks back. He’s got a son, almost 2 years out of high school, who has a real job (with benefits, union representation, overtime, etc.). The kid is a good employee, works hard, gets overtime, all that stuff. He never wanted to go to college, wasn’t into school, so almost immediately upon graduating HS he went to work. My friend is concerned that his son is in a job that is good enough for now, but that his son has never shown any passion about…well, anything. And he’s worried that without a passion, without something to aim towards, he’ll just be in this job (or a series of jobs like them) that don’t really lead him anywhere. (The son is living at home, so his expenses at the moment are light, but that’s not the primary concern of my friend’s right now.)
I wasn’t really sure what to tell him, to be honest. In my profession, I see a lot of teenagers who “are passionate” about this, that, or the other thing, but don’t have the ability to follow through – to actually do the grunt work needed to get where they think they want to go. Or they get their “passions” from elsewhere – society, parents, other family members. Those shallow passions will struggle to carry them when they’re in college, in year 2 of pre-med, and they are slogging through organic chemistry (which they don’t really love, but they know they need to pass in order to accomplish that goal, that arose from who-knows where, of going to med school).
I struggled to come up with something to say to my friend because he clearly has a kid who is willing to do work, but it’s not work that could lead to an accomplishment of a long-term goal. To the satisfaction of a passion.
I also struggled to say anything positive because, frankly, I stopped having a passion that would connect to a career when I was about 23, during year 2 of grad school. I stuck through grad school (yep, it’s possible to slide through a PhD) because there wasn’t any other option I could see open to me, and did the postdoc thing for a year or so for the same reason, until I finally broke and went a different direction. Lord knows, I didn’t leave a postdoc because I was passionate about the thing I would be going into; I did it because staying with the postdoc would have driven me quite mad with frustration. And now, in my early/mid-50s, I can safely say that passion hasn’t been a driving force in anything I have done professionally since my early 20s. Thus, the difficulty in coming up with anything intelligible to say to my friend.
I wonder if part of the issue is the idea of “being passionate about X”. Is that necessary for a full life? For a meaningful one? Sometimes I wonder if this is why I find Stoicism and Buddhism so appealing – they seem to be philosophies for living that are explicitly anti-“passion”. I don’t know what to tell my friend about his son, except that I think living a life in which your job and its prospects for advancement are what matters most isn’t a life I’d recommend. And, that I do hope his son finds genuine meaning in something positive. I hope that for everyone, frankly.